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A Woman Who Lives 200k Years in the Past
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- BubRoss 7y agoShe's just a woman who lives in the wood, who writes this crap?
- X6S1x6Okd1st 7y agoThe byline says Katherine Rowland
- BubRoss 7y agoDid she invent a time machine?
- X6S1x6Okd1st 7y agoI don't believe so. Did you actually interpret the headline as being literal? I don't think any other readers share your struggle.
- egypturnash 7y agoWith an extensive skill set and knowledge base that is probably larger than everything you know about computers. How much of your life could you build from first principles?
- BubRoss 7y agoWould that make me live 200,000 years in the past? I missed the time travel alluded to in the title.
- egypturnash 7y agoShe lives like someone in the Stone Age, it’s a metaphor. You’ve heard of those, right? They are a way of saying a thing by saying something that is not literally true - she does not have a time machine, or if she does she has been very good at concealing it - but in an interesting way that conveys the essential point the writer would like to make.
- colinmegill 7y agoWe would be out of deer the first week.
- X6S1x6Okd1st 7y agoNowhere in here was there a suggestion of 7 billion people adopting this lifestyle. The only suggestion was that there should be a wild human preserve for those that want to live in this lifestyle. Obviously not many people want to live like this anyways.
- greedo 7y agoThere's over 30 million deer in North America. And moose, and antelope, and bear, beaver, elk, geese, ducks, quail, pheasant. I think there's plenty of wildlife to feed us.
- Google234 7y agoI think you need to think some more. Search how many people there are in North America. 1 deer might feed one person for 1 week so basically that’s enough food to Feed everyone for a day?
- kadonoishi 7y agoRelevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1338/ https://xkcd.com/1338/ Also a paper on biomass: https://www.pnas.org/content/115/25/6506 https://www.pnas.org/content/115/25/6506
- greedo 7y agoThat's why I included all the other wildlife, not to mention fish. And deer breed like rabbits.
- masonic 7y agodeer breed like rabbits A rabbit can have 60 kits a year. A doe averages two fawns a year, if she mates at all.
- munk-a 7y agoAh, those domesticated horses seem to be helping quite a bit.
- donio 7y ago> It’s hard to be a hunter-gatherer these days. It's the opposite. Today if things go really bad, let's say you or someone you care about gets injured, really sick or run out of food you can fall back to civilization instead of just dying. Maybe there are people who play in hardcore mode but they won't be the ones you hear about.
- chongli 7y agoThat’s assuming you can make it back to civilization. If you live in a remote area, that may be difficult or impossible. Hunter-gatherers of the past, on the other hand, had friends and family to take care of them. Sure, they didn’t have access to modern medicine, but at least they had someone to feed them and keep them warm while they attempted to heal.
- tathougies 7y agoIf that family could manage to acquire the resources needed to heal. More likely, they would just die after a long and painful death and their family would mourn and hope they could birth another baby to take your place.
- chongli 7y agoDepends on what type of injury it is. There are lots of injuries that don’t require medical attention, such as minor sprains and hairline fractures, that you could survive as long as you had someone to feed you and take care of you. I don’t think you can say you’re “more likely” to just die just because you don’t have access to a doctor.
- tathougies 7y agoLiterally no one needs to go to the doctor for a sprain.
- tonyarkles 7y ago
- ngngngng 7y ago> If indeed our lives were better back when we lived in roving bands, would it be wise to consider how we might revive aspects of our deep past? This pings something about modern existence that bothers me. If you want stop participating in the rat race, the only accepted way to do that is to have acquired enough money to retire. You can't just go find an unused plot of land to exist on. And if you did you'd be there illegally. You also can't just construct your own shelter that you find adequate. It has to reach the very stringent and remarkably expensive building codes that exist virtually everywhere. All these modernities come together as if to say "either learn how to exist like us or you have no right to exist."
- munificent 7y ago> You also can't just construct your own shelter that you find adequate. It has to reach the very stringent and remarkably expensive building codes that exist virtually everywhere. Are you in the US? Most of the US is incredibly cheap and has virtually no building codes. You don't see it if you never get out of the major metro areas, but there is like a million miles of undeveloped cheap land. A quick search reveals a pile of websites that specifically cater to this offering acres in the middle of nowhere for less than a thousand bucks. Of course, you're in the middle of fucking nowhere so all of the benefits of modernity don't go with you. But if your goal is opt out of much of the social contract, there is plenty of places in the US to do it.
- perl4ever 7y agoI seem to remember there are places with little or no property taxes as well. Nevada, Florida?
- slfnflctd 7y agoI did a search on this a couple years ago and found a table of property tax data (no idea where now). From what I recall, Mississippi, Alaska and Nevada were all pretty low. There weren't as many low-tax areas as you might expect, though, and I'm sure a few of those are less than hospitable. Property taxes really are the hardest part of this idea. You can find ways to unload almost every other expense (if you have enough time & energy, that is!). I guess you could be a nomad, moving your campsite around a national forest every couple weeks-- but you'd still need permits for any kind of hunting or fishing, and too much gathering might also be frowned upon. Honestly, this lady was right when she said the only way to really live completely free in this age is to do it illegally. To be fair, though, there are probably a lot of places where you could do it & be unlikely to get caught.
- cosmodisk 7y agoAnd why not if that's what floats her boat. I remember years ago, under very unusual circumstances, I met this guy in his mid 70s,who was living in a tent somewhere in a park or nearby forest in Stockholm.The guy could speak 6 or so languages,was using his laptop every now and then and had a very sound mind. Technically,he was homeless. He used to visit a homeless center in the city to get some food. Apparently the guy just wanted to live this way because he was sick and tired of the life he had earlier. Fair enough. The main problem with all these ancient ways of living is healthcare: I could be a Robinson Crusoe in some forest without issues, however as soon as I get asthma attack, some nasty wound or a bacterial infection, I'm more or less dead...
- cco 7y agoI happen to know a few people in the larger "primitive" community in the Pacific Northwest, though I am not one myself. I can't speak for them but have know them for >10 years and am pretty close with some. Feel free to ask me any questions and I can do my best to answer.
- zemvpferreira 7y agoThanks! I’m curious to know how they handle health problems, big and small. Do they use modern medicine as indiscriminately as one of us would?
- cco 7y agoDefinitely not as indiscriminately. Interestingly a large number of these people went down this path initially because of chronic health problems, e.g. autoimmune issues; things that our modern medical system is not great at diagnosing or treating but sometimes radical diet changes or the like can alleviate symptoms. For most run-of-the-mill things they'll just use natural remedies which, if you have no experience with them, can be surprisingly effective. Aspirin was derived from willow bark, chewing that bark gets rid of a headache just as well. With that said when things get serious and/or acute, the people I know do still use modern medicine as a backstop. If someone were to break their leg and have a piece of bone sticking out of their skin, I'm certain they would go to a hospital. Or for instance if they couldn't breath because they caught covid-19, I'm sure they'd go to a hospital and use a ventilator. There are probably diehards who wouldn't, but those exist in cities too ;)
- natmaka 7y agoPandemics (COVID-19 included) aren't possible in an usual tribal zone, where population density remains low (because there is not industrial ways to produce food) and people travel much more slowly and rarely than we do (because there is no vehicle). Many (maybe even most(?)) our modern thingies, respirators included, are only useful/necessary because we live as we do. IMHO the bottom line is: are we more happy and fulfilled to live as we do than to live like 'Lynx' (the woman subject of the article) does?
- starpilot 7y agoThis is really just big LARPing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_action_role-playing_game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_action_role-playing_game that is for-profit by running classes. It talks about how she goes to bars, and the local library to check her email, and flies to other countries. Article is a bit of an advertorial for her programs (which do sound cool), similar to another one from Outside on this guy's group dirt bike trips: https://www.outsideonline.com/2410685/wilderness-collective-men-outdoor-therapy https://www.outsideonline.com/2410685/wilderness-collective-... Overall takeaway is that organized wilderness travel is something that appeals to techies heavily.
- samatman 7y agoIt's not LARPing, it's creative anachronism. There's a difference.
- tathougies 7y agoNo the issue is that people like your acquaintance rely on other people living life in a way they don't want to in order to subsidize their preferred way of life. I'm all for homesteading by yourself away from society, but the moment you walk into a homeless shelter asking for a meal funded by the people in the rat race that you like to condemn and opt out of, I'm afraid my opinion starts to matter.
- cosmodisk 7y agoAbsolutely agree. Most of the time this kind of lifestyle is only partially possible and still requires reliance on modern world and its people.
- gerbilly 7y ago> the moment you walk into a homeless shelter asking for a meal funded by the people in the rat race that you like to condemn and opt out of, I'm afraid my opinion starts to matter. I'm not sure it matters that much. The number of people doing this is so vanishingly small that I'd characterize your opinion on the matter as peevish. Insisting that people be consistent and that everything always be fair a regressive trait.
- tathougies 7y ago> Insisting that people be consistent and that everything always be fair a regressive trait. On the contrary, peddling injustice, no matter how small, is the first step in unraveling society.
- gerbilly 7y agoIf you say so. If you'd characterize a semi-homeless person getting a free sandwich 'unjust,' then thanks for making my point for me then :-) edit: grammar
- tathougies 7y agoNo. I characterize someone choosing to be homeless who does not have to be (the situation described above) and yet depending on others to feed him as unjust, yes. It would be equally unjust of me -- a perfectly able-bodied human adult -- to ask for charity as well. This is not about unchosen homelessness and poverty; this is about people shirking responsibility because they don't like it. Stop changing the topic.
- divbzero 7y agoI wonder when in (pre)history commerce first developed. 200,000 years ago could Lynx have offered classes in return for food, shells, or an early form of debt? (e.g., “Teach me to fish and I will share half of my first year’s catch with you.”)
- aazaa 7y agoWhat's interesting is what this article doesn't mention. Take, for example, antibiotics. It's easy to take these miraculous little pills for granted even though we've had them for fewer than 100 years. Take one wrong step, make one bad food decision, or cut yourself building something and it could be game over. For example, take Calvin Coolidge Jr.: > ... while playing lawn tennis with his brother on the White House grounds, sixteen-year-old Calvin, Jr. developed a blister atop the third toe of his right foot. Before long, the boy began to feel ill and ran a fever. Signs of a blood infection appeared, but despite doctors’ best efforts, young Calvin, Jr. was dead within a week. https://www.coolidgefoundation.org/blog/the-medical-context-of-calvin-jr-s-untimely-death/ https://www.coolidgefoundation.org/blog/the-medical-context-... Lincoln's son, William, died from typhoid fever. I bring up these two cases because the children of well-to-do, powerful men dying from these diseases today would be a scandal. But not long ago, it was to be expected from time to time. I'd be curios whether Lynx has ever had to go to the hospital for an infection, or maybe childbirth.
- chrisco255 7y agoIsn't it generally a temporary lifestyle to teach lessons about self-reliance and adaptiveness and not some permanent lifestyle like say, the Amish, who do use modern healthcare despite living a 19th century lifestyle?
- asdkjh345fd 7y agoThe amish don't make any particular effort or have any particular desire to live a 19th century lifestyle. They simply avoid technology that they consider to have more downsides than upsides.
- blululu 7y agoThe Amish are more opposed to greed than technology. The two often go hand in hand but not always - individual congregations decide for themselves.
- jdkee 7y agoAlso protected from some nasty bugs by herd immunity from the vaccinated.
- freepor 7y agoLOL. With inherited wealth allowing her to enforce her property rights with an armed government, with a log cabin built with modern technology, with fuckin’ running water. She lives 110 years in the past, not 200,000.
- gchamonlive 7y agoCan you claim to be living primitively while mounting horses? I believe hose taming and its use for war and transportation is somewhat a recent technology (~2000 BCE)
- every 7y agoI bet I can guess which browser she uses...
- subsubzero 7y agoIf you like stuff like this you may like this article, https://www.businessinsider.com/adrain-chessers-photos-of-hunter-gatherer-americans-2014-5#jp-hartsong-finisia-madrano-and-their-group-live-nomadically-and-travel-according-to-the-seasons-1 https://www.businessinsider.com/adrain-chessers-photos-of-hu... it follows a band of hunter gatherers who travel through the great basin desert (Nevada, Utah, and Calif) and has some amazing pictures of a way of life that I didn't think existed anymore. They aren't as strict as the OP's article (they have facebook pages) but really fascinating nonetheless.
- codecamper 7y agoLooks all the 30+ year olds died out.
- peter303 7y ago"Into the Wild"
- klyrs 7y agoHaha, neat! Lynx is a really awesome person. I met her at a winter survival workshop. She's kind, generous and extremely observant. Not to mention, a mass of specialized knowledge that you'll never hear about -- in my experience she listens hard and says very little. Folks are posting a lot of baseless, irrelevant and shallow dismissals here. I'm happy to know she's got better things to do than read that drek.
- abeppu 7y agoOn the one hand, this sounds cool. On the other hand ... my understanding is the U.S. took so much land through violence and lying, and often with some rhetoric about how the native people that didn't farm or settle and live on specific parcels weren't "civilized". There was an assumption that Americans establishing farms and towns and whatever was inherently superior to the way Native Americans occupied the land they had been on since time literally immemorial. So it's cool, it's kinda bad-ass what she's doing. But isn't it also fucked up? Isn't it deeply hypocritical to occupy land that was taken from people in part using the justification that the way they lived wasn't civil or modern or productive enough, and then try to live on it in a "wild" way? I don't know anything about the specifics of the history of interactions of the tribes of the Okanagan area, where Twisp is. But I'm guessing that their inheritance didn't give them the freedom to choose how they wanted to live, or how they wanted to relate to a changing world. And I'm disappointed that absolutely none of that is even mentioned in passing in this article.
- georgeoliver 7y agoNot to discount your comment which I largely agree with, but to the article's credit there is at least passing mention: >Some suggest that the primitive-skills community can run the risk of appropriating indigenousness. Practitioners of bushcraft draw liberally from the world’s traditions but are themselves typically white people, often endowed with at least some degree of privilege. “There is an inherent colonialism built into the primitive-skills idea,” says Kiliii Yüyan, a photographer, survival expert, and one of Lynx’s occasional collaborators, who is a Chinese-American descendent of the Nanai people of Siberia. “Part of the idea is that you can be air-dropped into anywhere and survive off the land. Indigenous literally means ‘of a place’—survival is almost the exact opposite of that.”
- JKCalhoun 7y agoI kind of just want to live 50 years in the past. The 70's feel like a different planet now. I want turn to off my laptop and phone, turn on my CB...
- cortesoft 7y ago> Our wild history is presented as a time before the world was scarred by borders, before politics, before race, before even the concept of identity carved out its demarcations of who belongs and where. This is just flat wrong. Tribal politics are brutal, and any ancient community would have a very strong sense of identity, and about who belonged and who didn't. Life was way harder for people who didn't fit into the role assigned by their tribe; if you didn't conform, and were kicked out, you would die.
- armenarmen 7y agoThis. The names of many tribes is simply "the people" in their language. You can easily read into it that those humans not that are not members of their tribe are not people. http://www.native-languages.org/original.htm http://www.native-languages.org/original.htm
- natmaka 7y agoWe invented huge anonymous cities where either tight surveillance or gang wars flourish, extermination camps, total war and many other wonders. Let's explain to any tribe that we, 'people', painfully devised and realized ways to massively and indiscriminately kill very remote civilians using dedicated complex machinery (ICBMs), then discuss about who is 'people' for who. Comparing the 'costs' of nearly-constant but limited tribal violence to our own 'civilized' violence isn't easy.
- cortesoft 7y agoThey are the exact same thing. We have just transplanted those tribal aspects to our modern world, but we still are the same people.
- natmaka 7y agoIndeed. Therefore the "outsiders aren't real people" stance isn't specific to tribal life. Upon reading (above) "Tribal politics are brutal" and "Life was way harder" one may think about the way we wage war, establish the rat race in huge cities, try hard to control everything everywhere to the point of practically barring anyone to opt out... "brutal"? "harder"? Doubt so.
- cortesoft 7y agoI really can never understand this desire to get away from it all and live primitively. It sounds so miserable. I love modern conveniences and technology.
- markdown 7y ago> a 54-year-old British expat Immigrant. She isn't an expat.
- Nursie 7y agoShe's both, expat is just a term used (mostly by brits in my experience) to refer to people of British origin living abroad. It refers to migrants.
- markdown 7y agoI see. In my part of the world, an expat is someone who took a job in another country. This country where they are currently resident isn't their home; they are merely there for the duration of their contract.
- codinger 7y agoExpat is a word to distinguish white immigrants from the rest of the immigrants. White Americans living abroad are called expats as well.
- pascalxus 7y agoI've been on long hikes through the woods where few people tread. One thing I've noticed, is the apparent scarcity of food: at least food that we recognize as "food". There's no animals to hunt for, no bird's nest, no wild animals, even after a 4 hour long hike. No berries, no blueberries or anything fancy like that. What there is quite a bit of is edible greens: dandelions, oxylis, purslane, amaranth, lots of edible green plants and weeds. I can only imagine that our ancestors must of lived off greens. Modern day studies of wild human tribes in africa that really do live the way people lived hundreds of thousands of years ago, actually mainly subsist on greens. They've been studied, and the researchers have noted that they basically graze on leafy green vegetables all days, lucky to find anything else. As, the article alluded to, hunger was the norm, pretty much all day, everyday. This day and age, people think of hunger as an anomoly, a problem, something you can't experience for more than a few minutes without going crazy.
- drewnick 7y agoFair point, but it depends on where you live. Many places have lots of smaller animals like squirrels and rabbits. Even some deserts have rabbits and field mice, etc.
- pascalxus 7y agoBut, those animals are trained to stay away from humans. You won't see them out in the wilderness, at least not for long. And, you won't be able to catch up to one in the brushes where there's thorns, bushes, and all kinds of stuff that can stick you.
- veggieburglar 7y agoYou won’t see them while you’re hiking, because you’re making lots of noise and likely not out at the right times. Hunting , especially primitive hunting, is usually either lots of traps and snares or lots and lots of waiting.
- how_gauche 7y agoWhere I'm from we catch rabbits with snares.
- NathanRampersad 7y agoThis is quite an interesting article!
- ctdonath 7y agoCheck out Primitive Technology on YouTube for similar.
- JetBen 7y agoI don't like how she is referred to as a "woman", as by now, we all know that there is no such thing as "gender". Why can't it just be called a "person"?? Seriously people, this is the 20th century, ok.
- Thorentis 7y agoActually it's the the 21st century right now. And no, there's nothing wrong with referring to her as a woman.
- reeeeee 7y agoThe journalist writes that she "drives through the electric moss of the North Cascades". What does that mean?
- def8cefe 7y agoElectric adjective (of a color) brilliant and vivid.
- kyleblarson 7y agoAlso likely a reference to the fact that you drive through Newhalem on the way over the pass, which is a company town owned by Seattle City Light for hyrdo operations. I live in the next town over from Twisp and see Lynx and her crews out in the mountains and in town once in a while. The town I live in, Winthrop, has a Western theme and I always wonder if the summer tourists might think they're just part of the Western act.
- aquarin 7y agoIf you want to live like 200k years in the past, do not use language and money.
- mnw21cam 7y agoBen Fogle has gone round and made quite a few TV programmes about people who have escaped to the wild like this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Fogle:_New_Lives_in_the_Wild https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Fogle:_New_Lives_in_the_Wi...
- lihaciudaniel 7y agoTed Kaczynzksi would be rolling in his gr... Prison cell, not everyone has the ability to live like that.